


Bring Me To Life

by OfEndlessWonder



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-04
Updated: 2016-08-04
Packaged: 2018-07-29 08:41:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7677646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfEndlessWonder/pseuds/OfEndlessWonder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Entry for Supercat Week, Day Five - Soulmate AU. Everyone on the Earth is born with their soulmate's first words on their wrists. Everyone on Earth except for Cat Grant, that is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bring Me To Life

_Without a soul, my spirit's sleeping somewhere cold,_

_Until you find it there and lead it back home._

* * *

 

Cat Grant is five years old when she learns that she’s different.

It’s her first day of school, and she hears the two girls on the table in-front of her giggling with one another, their arms stretched across the wooden table in-front of them, wrists facing the ceiling, and Cat sees stark black ink on pale skin and _stares_.

She squints, deciding that the ink spells words, but from this far away she can’t see what they say.

The girls giggle louder until the teacher tells them to quiet down.

As she stretches to write something on the board at the front of the classroom, Cat catches a glimpse of a similar mark on the inside of her teacher’s wrist, and glances down at her own, the skin unblemished and unmarked.

For the rest of the day, she looks and she looks, and all around her, she sees words painted on wrists. Most of the marks are black, but some of them are faded, white, but every person she looks at has one.

Except for her.

She goes home that night and she sits at the kitchen table swinging her feet as she watches her father cook them dinner, and she notices, as he reaches up to grab something from one of the cupboards, that there’s a mark on him, too.

It’s faint, and she wouldn’t have noticed it if not for the way it catches and shines in the bright lights, and Cat’s curiosity gets the best of her.

“Daddy?” She asks, and he turns to her with one of those winning smiles, and she hops off her chair and runs over to him, wraps her arms around his waist as he stirs at something on the stove. She reaches for his sleeve, and she tugs until he looks down at her, and then she points at the ink. “What’s this?”

Something twists in his expression, and she stares up at him for a long time and he stares back, mouth opening and closing a few times before he sighs.

“Go and sit at the table,” he tells her, and there’s something solemn on his face that makes her think she’s said something she shouldn’t, and she’s quick to obey, scurrying back over to her seat as he takes a pan off the heat before heading towards her and sitting in the seat beside her. “Can you read what this says?” He asks her, angling his wrist towards her.

She takes it between her little hands and she squints down at the white mark with a frown between her eyebrows.

“It says…” She bites at her bottom lip, and then decides it says, “’It’s Katherine.’”

“That’s right,” he beams, and she allows herself to feel a flash of pride. “Those were some of the first words your mother ever said to me. That’s what these marks mean, Kitty.” It’s a nickname she hates anyone but him using. “People are born with a black mark on their wrist that gives them a way to identify their soulmate.”

“Soulmate?” Cat asks, her eyes wide, sensing that this is an important word, an important conversation, even though she’s too young to truly comprehend it.

“It’s like… true love.”

“Like my fairytales!” Cat cries, because they’re her favourite stories, and her father has read a great many of them to her over the years.

“Yes, sweetheart, like your fairytales. And when soulmates meet… the black starts to fade, and it changes to white, instead.” Cat nods, following along perfectly – and then she glances at her own wrists, brows knitting into a frown.

“But then why don’t I have one, Daddy?” He stares down at her with sad, sad eyes, sadder than Cat has ever seen, and she watches him swallow and understands suddenly that this is not _normal_ , that her father thinks that this this is a _bad_ thing, that she is _different_. 

“I… I don’t know, Kitty.” He looks crestfallen, and Cat stares at her wrist like if she wills it, a mark might suddenly appear.

It doesn’t, and her father scoops her up into a hug so tight that she wiggles, yelling ‘I can’t breathe!’ until he lets her go.

Her mother comes home and they eat dinner in silence, and when she asks what Cat learned on her first day at school, she doesn’t tell her about soulmates, though it feels like it’s the most important.

Later, that night, as her father tucks her into bed, he reads her not one, but _two_ stories, even though he usually shakes his head and kisses her goodnight after the first when she asks for another.

She wonders if it’s because he feels sorry for her.

She decides that if she gets extra things, maybe it isn’t such bad news, after all.

x-x-x

By the time she’s thirty-five, Cat is accustomed to the sympathy on people’s faces whenever they catch a glimpse of her wrists.

It stopped bothering her a long time ago.

It had used to – when she was in school, the kids had been cruel, taunting her and telling her that she was destined to end up alone. The words had been harsh but Cat hadn’t taken any of it to heart, though when she moved to elementary school she wore a black wristband so that no-one would know her secret.

It wasn’t uncommon – she’d seen people do it before, those who wanted to keep words private or those that bordered on inappropriate. So she wore a band and she ignored her friends when they’d ask her, with curious eyes, what words she was hiding beneath it.

She knew she was different, but she didn’t let that become a disadvantage. She stopped reading fairytales and she told herself that she didn’t need love to succeed in life, and boys were stupid _anyway_.

While the girls around her were tittering away about the quarterback who had winked at them during their lunch period, Cat threw herself into her classes, fell in love with English and science and math, instead, and she excelled even when everyone else around her wavered.

She made her priority her career, rather than scouring the ends of the earth to find her ‘true love’ (Cat’s heard too many stories of heartbreak and cheating, of those who had lost their mates before they’d ever even found them – at least, she supposes, she doesn’t have a red mark in place of nothing, because she doesn’t think she could stand _those_ looks and the whispered apologies from strangers).

She knows early on what she wants to achieve, studies journalism and business at college so that the second she graduates she can begin to build her dream. She uses the money her father set aside for her when he died to get her start in the world, and she all but breaks her back at the Daily Planet to get the experience she needs to set out on her own.

It’s not easy, but CatCo keeps her warm at night, is the fire in her soul, and Cat tells herself that she doesn’t need anything else as long as she has her company.

Except once CatCo is up and running, she feels empty, where she thought she’d feel elated. Her love for it doesn’t fade, and her appetite for success never wanes, but she glances around her employees and she sees more and more black fade to white, and she goes home to an empty apartment and she feels _lonely_ , for the first time in her life.

She decides to have a child.

A perfect, tiny little thing that will love her like no-one else ever will, and when she holds him in her arms for the first time she’s never felt anything like it.

It’s the single greatest moment of her life, as a red face peers up at her, and a tiny, tiny fist reaches up to tug at her hair.

There is a mark on his wrist, though the letters are too small to read, and Cat breathes out a sigh of relief, because at least her son will never feel like he is missing something that everyone else around him seems to have.

She has her company, and she has her son, and that is all that matters to her.

And then, when she’s thirty-six, she’s lying in bed reading a book when she feels pain lance through her right arm. The book falls from her hand and onto her white sheets as she gasps, the pain almost unbearable, and when she glances down at her arm she gasps again, when she sees a smudge of black against her skin.

She clambers to her feet and into her bathroom, wondering if she’s dreaming. She checks her wrist in the mirror, to ascertain that she isn’t seeing things, but the letters do not fade.

She stares at her reflection, notes her pale face and wild eyes, before she traces the two words with the nail of her index finger.

‘Miss Grant’, is all it says, and Cat sighs.

So she might have a soulmate, after all, but finding them was going to be near impossible, considering the only two people in the entire world who _don’t_ call her that are her son, and her mother.

x-x-x

Kara Danvers is twelve when she crash-lands on an alien planet, twenty-four years later than planned.

Everything is bright and loud and _strange_ , and when Kal-El – a grown man, with a handsome face and blue, blue eyes, wearing a cape that flutters in the wind with the family symbol on his chest that makes her ache with the memories of what she’s lost – pulls her from her pod Kara clamps her hands over her ears and refuses to move.

Kal-El carries her inside, to where things aren’t quite so bright but are still so very _loud_. Everything is overwhelming and everything is different and Kara is terrified, because this wasn’t how things were supposed to go.

But then she thinks of what it would have been like to land here with a cousin, a baby, of having to raise him in this strange new world, and is almost glad that she had failed, that he had landed before her and been brought up by humans, that he knows of their language and culture and can help her adjust.

She’s been on Earth for three hours and forty-four seconds when she notices it, a black mark on her inner wrist that wasn’t there when she left Krypton.

The symbols look strange and she tugs on Kal-El’s hand and asks him what they mean, and he replies in stilted Kryptonian that hurts her ears (he butchers the language, too used to human words and noises and sounds, and it makes Kara want to cry because she’ll never hear it spoken perfectly ever again).

“It means that you have someone here,” he tells her, in a gentle voice, though he looks terrified by the sight of her, like he doesn’t know what to do with her (and he doesn’t, because he ships her off to Danvers’ less than a week later once she can form a sentence in English and she doesn’t see him very often after that). “Someone to love you. A mate. It’s good.”

“But what does it mean?” She repeats, because the symbols are still so strange to her eyes, even though it hurts to hear him speak in their mother tongue.

“It’s a number,” he answers, and he tells her the Kryptonian equivalent. “10:15. It’s a time. Maybe it’s when you’ll meet.”

Kara nods, even though she doesn’t really understand it. He shows her his own wrist proudly, and she pretends to be happy that he has found a human to spend his life with here on Earth.

She pushes it out of her mind, because soulmates sound strange where she’s unused to marrying someone for love, though sometimes she’ll find herself tracing the numbers absently, wondering when they’ll meet.

But for now, she has a whole new life to live, so many new things to see and learn if she’s going to fit in and hide here, and 10:15 is the farthest thing from her mind for a long, long time.

x-x-x

Cat searches everywhere, for a reason why the mark has suddenly appeared, so late in her life.

No-one has an answer for her.

She contacts experts from all around the globe, but no-one has ever heard of a case like hers. There have been a few, rare documented cases of people being born with no mark at all, but never one where it appears over time.

They say that she’s special, and they call it a miracle.

Cat finds it terrifying.

Every time she meets someone new, every time they say her name, Cat tenses, and rubs her thumb over the mark… but it never changes.

x-x-x

There’s a bounce in Kara’s step as she makes her way out of the elevator on CatCo’s fortieth floor.

She’s been waiting for this opportunity for a long, long time.

She might not be able to follow in her cousin’s footsteps in terms of being a hero (too many warnings ring in her ears, from Kal-El and from her foster parents and from her sister, and Kara decides that she will try and be normal, if only to get them off her _back_ ), but maybe she can try and make a difference in the world by becoming a reporter, instead.

And the chance to learn the ropes as an assistant to someone like Cat Grant?

Kara couldn’t think of anything better.

She’s heard of the woman’s meteoric rise to power, read her articles and seen her on the TV, and Alex teases her for having a bad case of hero worship (and maybe a crush to go along with it, because Cat Grant is drop-dead gorgeous and Kara hopes she can stop blushing long enough to survive this interview).

She’d seen this job advertised and known immediately that it was one she wanted, one that she’d do anything to get, and now she’s _here_ and she can barely believe it.

The office is busy, bustling, the sound of people chattering and typing frantically away at their keyboards filling Kara’s ears the second she steps off the elevator, and it almost feels like coming home.

She crashes into a guy in a shirt and tie that looks at her like she shouldn’t be real, and then Cat’s old assistant rushes past them with tears streaming down her face and Kara can’t help but _stare_ , because maybe she isn’t cut out for this, after all.

But she’s an alien from another planet and she has a skillset that none of Cat’s previous assistants would have even been able to _dream_ of, and she tells herself to be positive as she straightens her spine.

And then she hears Cat’s voice calling and Kara’s heart thuds in her chest, and then she hears words that turn her blood to ice in her veins.

“Where is my 10:15?”

10:15.

A number that had ceased to have any meaning for Kara, a number that she’d all but forgotten about, in favour of learning everything she could about this new planet whilst being determined not to forget a thing about her old one.

She stares towards Cat’s office with wide eyes and a pounding heart, and she only moves when Winn nudges her shoulder.

“Are you okay?”

“I… I’m fine,” she whispers, her voice hoarse. There’s two voices at war in her head – one telling her to step forward on unsteady legs to meet Cat Grant, her apparent freaking _soulmate_ , and the other telling her to turn tail and run in the opposite direction.

Eventually, it’s the former that wins out, her curiosity unable to be silenced.

Cat is sitting behind her desk in-front of a wall of screens, a queen in her throne, so beautiful that Kara can barely look at her.

It’s a struggle, to force herself to keep moving – especially when Cat takes one look at her and rolls her eyes, face lined with disappointment.

“M-miss Grant.” Her voice shakes and she clears her throat as she comes to a stop in-front of Cat’s desk. “Hi, I - ”

“I told them not to send me any more millennials - ” Cat starts – and god, her voice is soft and low and it _does_ things to Kara that she can’t even describe – but she cuts herself off abruptly with a gasp, whirling back around to face Kara, her eyes wide and terrified.

Kara knows what she’s just felt – a tingling in her wrist, an odd but not painful sensation – and Cat cradles her right wrist in her left hand, staring as the very edges of the black words begin to fade to white.

She tears her gaze away from her arm and back at Kara, and she can’t help but gasp herself at how it feels to be pinned in place by that gaze, by green, green eyes.

She could spend a lifetime staring into those eyes and never learn how to look away.

She hopes she never has to.

Cat stares at her for several long, heavy moments, and then her gaze changes from shock to something that looks a lot like awe, instead.

“It’s you.”

x-x-x

Cat can’t stop _staring_ at her.

If she’d been asked to sketch (despite the fact that she can’t draw to save her life) an image of what her perfect soulmate would look like, Kara Danvers would not have been it.

She’s young – _very_ young, and Cat thinks she’s going to need some time to process how she feels about that – and she looks so… _sunny_ , with a wide smile and bright eyes hidden behind the large black frames of her glasses.

And Cat would have never imagined her to be so beautiful.

Cat has gone so many years believing that there was no-one out there for her, has spent the last twelve staring at the black mark on her wrist with some resentment because now it was _there_ but she didn’t know _why_ and she was still alone.

And it’s not like her life is empty, because with Carter and CatCo she doesn’t have the _time_ to feel lonely, and she’s never needed anyone else to feel complete and she knows she never will.

But that doesn’t mean, as she stares at this beautiful, beautiful stranger (Kara, she tells her, holding out her hand, her fingers trembling, and Cat feels a rush of _something_ when she takes Kara’s hand in her own, feels it like a jolt straight to her heart), that she doesn’t feel like she’s just found something she’s been missing her entire life.

Judging from the wide-eyed amazement on Kara’s face, she feels the same way.

Cat doesn’t give her the job.

She doesn’t think it’s very ethical, to hire your soulmate as your assistant.

(Even though, she thinks bitterly, at least then the girl will understand from the outset just how difficult Cat can be, just how demanding and just how _busy_ , and maybe she’s not cut out for this soulmate business, after all).

Instead of hiring her, she asks her out on a date.

Kara’s answering smile is so bright that it nearly blinds her, and she nods so quickly that her glasses nearly fly straight off her nose.

x-x-x

Kara rushes out of the office once she’s given Cat her number and assured her that she’ll come by later so that they can talk over dinner, feeling like her knees are about to give out at any moment.

Winn calls after her as she makes a beeline for the nearest bathroom, asking her how the interview went, but Kara doesn’t stop to answer him, doesn’t know how to even begin to explain what just happened, what she’s experiencing as she thinks of Cat’s smile and her eyes and the softness of her skin as she’d shaken Kara’s hand.

She stares at herself in the mirror in the bathroom and barely recognises her own reflection.

Her cheeks are tinged pink, her eyes wide and bright, and she can’t stop _smiling_. She feels so giddy that she’s surprised she’s not floating a clear foot off the ground, and her heart is beating three times its normal speed inside of her chest, echoing loudly in her ears.

She fishes her phone from her bag and dials her sister’s number with trembling fingers, because she needs to tell _someone_ about this before she explodes.

_“Hey, Kara,”_ Alex answers on the first ring, expecting her call. _“How was the interview?”_

“I didn’t get it,” Kara tells her, but when Alex offers her sympathies and tells Kara that there’s better out there than being Cat Grant’s assistant (they’d argued about it when Kara had told her about the interview, because she said that someone with Kara’s abilities could do so much more – Kara had snapped that maybe that would be true, if she could actually _use_ her abilities, and Alex had soon gone quiet after that), Kara speaks right over her. “But Alex, listen – guess what time my interview was at? I didn’t even _realise_.” She should have, looking back. “10:15.”

_“Ten fif – oh my god,”_ Alex breathes, and Kara wants to scream her joy from the rooftops. _“Kara… are you telling me that… Cat Grant is your soulmate?”_ She doesn’t sound nearly as excited as Kara thought she would be, and she frowns. _“Kara, this is_ bad _.”_

“What? Why?”

_“Because she’s Cat Grant! She’s a reporter! A pretty vicious one, from all accounts. If she finds out what you can do… who you are… you can’t tell her, Kara.”_

“What?” Kara’s frown deepens, her earlier happiness ebbing with every word her sister speaks. “I can’t lie to her, Alex!” She’s not exactly an expert, but she’s pretty sure that that’s a big relationship no-no.

_“You have to,”_ Alex tells her, the picture of seriousness _. “I mean it, Kara. She can’t find out. She’d expose you.”_

“Not if I asked her not to.”

_“How do you know that? You only just met her! She’s not going to give up the story of her lifetime for some girl she only just met, Kara, you - ”_

“I’m not some girl she just met,” Kara answers, angrily. “I’m her soulmate, and my whole life on this planet, all I’ve ever heard everyone around me talk about is how that’s supposed to mean something. How magical it is to meet the person that you’re going to spend the rest of your life with, how everything just… clicks the moment your eyes meet. I guess it was too much to expect my sister to be happy about me meeting mine.”

_“Wait, Kara - ”_

“No.” She shakes her head, tears stinging in her eyes. “I think you’ve said enough, Alex.” She hangs up and wipes angrily at her eyes, switching off her phone when her sister calls her back three times in quick succession.

She really doesn’t feel like talking.

x-x-x

“Are you okay?” Cat asks, as she watches Kara glower down at the menu in-front of her. “Do you not like anything on there?” She’d chosen the least pretentious of her favourite restaurants for tonight, because she had a feeling that Kara would be uncomfortable enough, judging from her earlier bumbling awkwardness earlier.

Cat isn’t feeling much better, either – she doesn’t remember the last time she felt so nervous. Her stomach has been in knots all day, and she’s barely eaten, barely been able to concentrate, because she’d been so terrified of what tonight would bring.

This might be the most important night of her life, and she’s terrified of ruining it.

“We can go somewhere else, if you like. Somewhere you’d be more comfortable, or - ”

“N-no! No, Miss Grant, this is fine.” Kara manages a smile, though it’s a little weak. “I don’t know how I’m going to pay my half, though, because I had an interview for a really big job today, and it didn’t go so well,” she jokes, and her smile this time is more genuine.

“First of all, call me Cat,” Cat tells her. “I feel old enough without you using my title. And second of all, tonight is on me. You can foot the bill when you take me to whatever hipster place you millennials like to frequent.”

“Deal,” Kara murmurs, with another winning smile. “And you’re not old.”

“Oh?” She quirks an eyebrow, because she hadn’t had the chance to read Kara’s resume earlier but she’s willing to bet that the woman opposite her is half her age. “And just how old, exactly, are you, Kara Danvers?”

“Twenty three.” Cat winces, and takes a sip of the wine that she’d ordered for them earlier. “But age is just a number.”

“A rather important one,” Cat murmurs, eyeing Kara over the rim of her glass. “You’re barely out of college, and I’m…” She trails off, beginning to wonder what she’s doing here, how this girl could possibly be her one and only.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” Kara shrugs, propping her chin on one hand, blue eyes wise as she holds Cat’s gaze. “If my naiveté and complete lack of experience doesn’t matter to you.” Cat tilts her head to one side, considering. “Looks to me like we both have insecurities. Advantages and disadvantages. Maybe that’s what makes us perfect for each other.”

It’s the kind of bright and sunny optimism that would usually make Cat scoff, that she would usually tear down with her cynicism, but tonight, looking into Kara’s eyes, bright and earnest and the colour of the ocean, Cat finds that she doesn’t want to.   

“Looks like opposite really do attract,” she says instead, which makes Kara grin and her heart skip a beat. 

x-x-x

Kara doesn’t think she’s ever felt so out of her element, sitting in a fancy restaurant where each meal on the main menu seems to cost a small fortune.

But Cat’s eyes are gentle and her smile is warm, and when Kara dares to settle her hand on-top of Cat’s where it rests on-top of the table, Cat doesn’t pull away.

She glances down at Kara’s hand with something like wonder on her face, and Kara marvels at how soft Cat’s skin is beneath her fingertips.

“So, tell me about yourself, Kara Danvers,” Cat murmurs, looking at Kara with a searching gaze. Kara wonders what she’s looking for as she gives Cat a brief summary, and if she finds it.

Her eyes turn sympathetic as Kara tells her of what it was like to lose her parents at twelve years old. She feels guilty, for lying about the details, for using the cover story the Danvers’ had instilled in her before she’d started at school.

Her feelings about it are the same – the unbearable, aching pain, the difficulties of adjusting to life in a new place in a new house, living with strangers that treated her like she was porcelain, and prone to break if they so much as spoke too loudly.

But she isn’t telling the whole truth, and she thinks that to a woman like Cat Grant, who made it her life’s work to chase _down_ the truth, that that will matter.

It feels like deceit, but her sister’s words ring loud in her ears and Kara tells herself that she’ll tell Cat the truth, one day. When she knows her better, when she won’t panic about being exposed to the world and putting her loved ones in danger.

When she won’t look at Kara with horror in her eyes, won’t fear for her safety, when she finds out that Kara could break her bones with something as simple as hug.

x-x-x

Cat isn’t stupid.

She knows that Kara Danvers is hiding something from her.

She suspects that that something might have something to do with the reason why her mark had only appeared when she was thirty-six instead of at birth.

But she’s waited forty six years to find out what that means, and she doesn’t think that waiting a little longer will hurt her.

x-x-x

Cat Grant is even more fascinating than Kara could have ever imagined.

After stuttering her way through her painfully short life story, Kara gets to hear a little of Cat’s in return, and she takes her breath away.

She’s driven, and she’s determined, and she’d built a whole media corporation using her two bare hands, and she’s probably the most amazing person that Kara has ever met.

And she cannot believe, that out of everyone on this Earth, all seven plus billion of them, that her words are inked onto Cat’s skin.

She’s definitely not complaining though, as she listens to Cat talk (Kara thinks she could listen to her voice all day long and not get bored, because it wraps around her and sinks into her skin), tracing patterns on the back of her hand with her fingertips, scarcely able to believe that any of this is real.

That Cat Grant is really in-front of her right now, telling her about the son she had brought into this world alone, and Kara knows, from the adoration that is clear in Cat’s eyes when she talks about him, that he is what she loves most in this world.

“Is that going to be a problem for you?” Cat asks quietly, peering into her wine glass and looking like she’s barely breathing.

“That you have a son?” Kara asks, laying her hand flat on-top of Cat’s and squeezing gently when she nods. “No. I mean, I’ve never really been around kids and they kind of scare me?” Cat laughs, and Kara wants that sound on repeat in her head every day for the rest of her life. “But he sounds pretty great.”

“He’ll probably be terrified of you, too, so you can bumble your way through it together.” Kara smiles softly. “Not that I’d force you to meet him until you were ready.”

“Or until he’s ready,” Kara offers, because the kid’s feelings are important too, and in reply Cat shoots her a warm smile that makes her heart thud loudly in her chest.

“Speaking of my son,” Cat murmurs then, as she glances down at the watch on her wrist, something like regret flitting across her face. “I should probably be getting back to him soon.”

“Of course.” Kara walks her out, and when Cat asks her if she had fun tonight her answer is an emphatic yes because the food was incredible and the company was even better, and Cat leans her back against the door of the town car that pulls up to the curb to take her arm and looks at Kara like she’s staring at something that’s too good to be real. “Let me know when you want me to take you to whatever hipster place I, as a millennial, like to frequent.”

“How about Friday night?” Cat asks around a smirk, and when Kara nods she smiles, reaching out to curl her fingers around the lapels of Kara’s jacket.

She stops breathing when Cat tugs her close, so that she’s pressing her back against her town car, and she looks up at Kara through her eyelashes, and this close, her eyes are green and gold and Kara knows she could spend a lifetime trying to replicate their exact shade on a canvas and never succeed.

Cat looks at Kara like she’s asking her permission, and Kara thinks it’s for more than just a kiss – it’s for an acceptance of whatever is budding between them, an acceptance of _Cat_ and all that she has to offer.

Kara is only too eager to agree to it all.

So she curls a hand around the back of Cat’s neck, tilts her head up and brushes their lips together. It’s barely a kiss, but it’s enough to make Cat shudder against her, fingers gripping Kara’s jacket tightly. It’s enough for Kara’s heart to sing, to beat so fast that she’s half-afraid that it will stop, and when Cat leans up on her toes to capture Kara’s lips in another, deeper kiss, she doesn’t think she’ll ever want to come back up for air.

x-x-x

It’s five weeks before Cat gets the answers to the questions she’s been asking her whole life.

Five weeks of dating Kara Danvers, who is her opposite in almost every way, who fills her life, her _heart_ with hope and laughter, who makes her days lighter with a single one of those sunny, sunny smiles.

They’re on Cat’s couch, Carter tucked away in bed down the hall – he gets along with Kara swimmingly well, and the girl really does seem to be perfect in every single way – and Cat has a glass of wine clutched in one hand as she watches Kara fiddle nervously with her hands, obviously on the cusp of saying something big.

“I… there’s something I need to tell you.” She’s pale, and she won’t look Cat in the eye, and Cat doesn’t know whether she should be nervous or exhilarated, to be so close to the answers she’s been searching for for so long. “Something… something I haven’t been honest with you about.”

“Kara.” When she won’t look up, Cat shifts, setting her glass down on the table and taking Kara’s chin in her hand, tilting her head so that their eyes meet. “You can tell me anything.”

She’s certainly spilled more to the girl over the past five weeks than she has to a single other soul alive.

Kara makes her feel safe in a way no-one else has ever been able to come close to, and that’s just one of the many reasons why she’s glad that destiny has drawn them together.

“I… Rao this is harder than I expected it to be.” Cat’s ears perk up at the unfamiliar word, and Kara runs a shaking hand through her hair. “Okay, so… I know you know about Superman, right?” Cat nods, because _everyone_ knows about Superman.

It makes her seethe to think about many exclusives he has gifted to her greatest rival.

“Well… what if I told you that he wasn’t the only survivor from his planet?”

“I’d say that was very interesting indeed,” Cat murmurs, voice barely higher than a whisper, and Kara gives a smile that’s more like a grimace before she takes a deep breath.

The story she weaves over the next few minutes is one of the most wondrous things Cat has ever heard.

She learns of a dying planet and the girl that was sent away to protect a mere baby; how things had never quite gone to plan and the girl had spent twenty-four years asleep, in stasis, only to eventually land on a strange new planet where she had powers and abilities that she could have never even dreamed of.

Cat asks, in a shaking voice, what date she had crashed onto Earth. 

Kara, confused, frowns and tells her, and Cat lets out a laugh because of course.

April sixteenth.

The day her mark had appeared.

Kara is looking at her like she expects Cat to turn and flee the room, like she expects her to turn Kara away. Her eyes are wary and she’s angling herself away from Cat like she’s afraid of her reaction (which is laughable, really, considering she must share Superman’s abilities and Cat would never be able to harm her even if she wanted to).

But Cat understands her reasons for secrecy – would have even if Kara hadn’t stuttered her way through them – and is just glad that Kara has chosen to share this precious part of herself with Cat, that she _trusts_ her with this secret, this secret that has the power to destroy her.

Kara has just put her heart in Cat’s hands, and the last thing Cat wants to do is break it.

She has a hundred questions, a thousand things that she wants to know.

She wants to learn all about this planet Krypton, to find out what it was like there, their cultures and traditions, how different Kara’s childhood and upbringing had been to those on Earth. She wants to ask about her beliefs, about how advanced they were, about what it was like, to travel across space. She wants to know about Kara’s powers, what her limits are and if there is anything that may be able to harm her. She wants to know why Kara isn’t out there using them for good like her cousin.

She wants to know _everything_.

But not for the benefit of CatCo. She’d never publish a word, unless Kara specifically asked her to.

No, she wants to know the answers to all of these things because Kara has become a part of her world, and she is endlessly fascinating, and Cat doesn’t want to stop until she knows every single thing about her.

She has a hundred questions, but in that moment, with Kara looking at her with scared, wide eyes, Cat doesn’t want to ask a single one of them.

Instead, she leans forward and catches Kara’s lips in a gentle kiss, and she breathes “thank you for telling me,” against her mouth when they part.

“You’re not mad at me?” Kara asks, still looking half-scared to death, but when Cat shakes her head she smiles and it’s so wide that her cheeks must ache with the force of it. “Really?”

“Never.” Kara grins and kisses her again, hot and hard and hungry, and Cat groans and allows herself to be pulled onto Kara’s lap by strong, strong hands.

That night, Kara lets Cat into her heart, and Cat lets Kara into her bed, tracing every inch of that young, lean body with fingers and lips and teeth, until Kara is quaking beneath her and breathing her name and holding Cat close like she never wants to let her go.

Later, when they’re both sated and exhausted, Cat watches Kara sleep.

She looks young and beautiful, her glasses gone and her hair down, cheeks still flushed and her chest rising and falling rhythmically with the force of her breaths.

She is beautiful, and Cat cannot believe that she is hers.

That this woman has crossed galaxies to be here, by her side.

She thinks back to what all of those experts had told her – that this was a miracle – and knows in her heart that they were right.


End file.
